Saki – 14

Summary
Touka is getting pretty pissed cuz Nodoka is making her look bad with the near perfect game! Since I have no idea what’s going on in terms of the mahjong, my mind starts to wonder at this point. I come up with the following sub-plots:

- Why does Hajime wear mismatched socks? I thought she lived in a rich girl’s family… even bimbo Hayate could dress nicely. Maybe she had tendonitis in her right knee, then decided to keep wearing the single long sock cuz it looked cool, kinda like how Iverson still wears that damn sleeve. You’re old AI! You can’t even get more than the midlevel now! Stop trying to look cool and start playing with the team!
- The fat chick from Kazekoshi would be marginally hot if she could lose about 100 pounds.
- What else gets Nodoka in that flushed hot state? Again, lots of doujin potential here.
- The demon Touka vs angel Nodoka scenes – given that they are a result of Touka’s imagination, why would she cast herself as the devil to Nodoka’s busty angel? Shouldn’t she be the force of good?

Touka finally busts out with a monster hand and retakes the overall lead, which puts a slight damper on Nodoka’s half-orgasmic state. Maybe it’s only 45% orgasmic now. At any rate, her AT-field is now busted, but I suppose her tits are good enough cushioning in case there’s some catastrophic collision.

But!

Momoka (who?!) starts winning hands! Oh, there is a 4th girl at the table, and she’s been throwing down riichi sticks without anybody noticing. What’s up with this invisible girl?

Momoka has been largely invisible her whole life – parents, peers, strangers, all have just looked right through her as if she never existed. That is, until she started playing online mahjong with the club at school. Using the handle “default player” she quickly catches their attention, but doesn’t actually show her face until the captain tracks her IP address down and busts in the classroom to declare her love (well, sorta). The captain, ah the captain – the only one who can see me – I will follow her forever! Anyways, Momoka uses her invisiblity to mess with her opponent’s minds, constantly catching Touka with calls that would otherwise have been easily made had Touka been paying attention. Cheap shit.

Preview

Up next on Saki: KOROMO NOT KODOMO

Thoughts
The show is pretty predictable in the sense that we know the non-cute girls like beanpole and sumo madam from Kazekoshi aren’t going to get their own backstory nor have any chance at beating the semi-cute or uber-cute girls. Ah, the anime world isn’t fair. That said, the Tsuruga captain isn’t that cute either, so she’ll probably get destroyed in the final round without putting up much of a fight. Momoka, however, is pretty cute, especially with her hair over her eyes like one of those old school puppets, which goes pretty well with her invisible character.

Another thing about this show that’s really shining through is the relationship between the captain and her players – Touka and Hajime got that nice “I’ll remain loyal to you forever” yuri vibe going on, the Tsuruga captain and Momo got that “you’re the only one I need” yuri vibe, and Kazekoshi has that “omg our captain is the nicest person in the world” yuri vibe. The only team that doesn’t really seem to have a captain-yuri dynamic is Kiyosumi, where they all just have some kind of “she’s a pretty good player that we can count on not to suck it up” respect for Hisa. Which is kinda weird as far as these sports-games type anime go, cuz usually the main char’s team always has the best chemistry and because of that they are able to beat teams with better players than their own. Well, except for Slam Dunk. You guys remember that shit? Shohoku had this monster team with ideal players at every position, and they would still struggle against teams with only one good player. Oh, and Prince of Tennis too, except I think that is more of a case of hyping up your own players too much when in fact players from other teams are just as good as your own. Anyways, the dynamic in Saki is a bit weird, cuz Kiyosumi seems to have all the strong players, and the other teams have all this awesome captain yuri action. Still, I guess they couldn’t have Kiyosumi’s captain take the yuri vibe away from Saki-Nodoka, so they had to make exceptions.

Next week: Koromo! Her feet don’t even touch the floor when she’s sitting, so there will be all sorts of opportunity for under-table shots. Epic matchup of luck coming up – I wonder if Koromo has any cool tile slamming moves?

Their abilities depend on their faces, ugly girls mean to end up losing and cute girls mean to end up winning or some kind of genius.
p.s. the captain, with one eye closes & the other eye opens, still creeps me out

@setsuke
The fifth round is call General (Taisho) round, and as such Saki can be called the General of her team. Same goes for Koromo, the cat girl and Yumi. It has nothing to do with being the mahjong club captains/leaders.

What with animes and their hot and perfect girls are somehow classified as ugly and invisible? Momoka actually fits that, cute face, cute hair, cute voice, nice body, her bust is bigger than like 90% of all the characters on the show so far. Now to find someone like that irl that latches onto me just because I talk to her!

I could have done without having to see the same flashback scene 3 times in a single episode. I mean, that’s even worse than Naruto in terms of “same episode footage re-usage”. I really felt like this episode was entirely too slow. It should have finished out all of the 4th round.

Stealth Momo was so cute. And the “I want you!” scene was hilariously cute. I love Yumi-chin’s reaction to Kaori going “That incident was you?!” Yumi, you were so obsessed, you IP tracked her down. A little late to be embarrassed over it now. LOL!

I didn’t mind the slowness of the episode if it’s going to be this cute.

Somehow even in the middle of all these hax powers, I’m having the most difficulty of all accepting Momo’s powers. So it’s like her discards and calls are invisible? So no one can ever win anything off her, or be vary of her being Riichi or in Tenpai? No discards are ever dangerous for her, as no one can ever call on her tiles? Even worse, she can intentionally discard dangerous tiles to make others Furi-ten if she has a clue what they are waiting for. I’m willing to accept even Saki’s and Koromo’s powers as more reasonable…

I’m guessing next episode we’ll see Nodoka break her Stealth mode, though. Momo’s powers don’t seem to work on electronics, and Nodoka is like a human computer in her playstyle.

All three’s powers are impossible, or at least incredibly unlikely. What makes it different is that Saki’s and Koromo’s powers affect the board, while Momo’s powers affect the opponents. So if you think of Saki’s powers as cheating to rearrange tiles to give a favorable result, Momo’s power would be like drugging your opponents to make them unable to think.